W/C Feb 2nd Weekly Roundup - What Moved In B2B This Week?
What Actually Moved B2B This Week (and Why It Matters)
After a brief hiatus for Jury Duty, I’m back, and catching up on what has happened in B2B over the last couple of weeks.
Whilst this period did not announce itself as a “big” week/period in B2B, there were significant movements, not least OpenAi moving into the ad game. However;
No blockbuster M&A.
No shiny new acronym.
No single platform launch that dominated the feed.
But once you line the stories up, a very clear pattern emerges:
Signals are drifting away from the places we’ve historically measured them and reappearing somewhere else entirely.
Below are the stories that mattered.
Then what they collectively tell us about where B2B is heading next.
🚨 The Macro Signal
Optimisation is accelerating. Learning is not.
Across the last 10–14 days we’ve seen:
more AI features shipped
more “copilot” announcements
more automation layered onto existing systems
What we haven’t seen is a rethink of what success actually means.
Most platforms are still:
optimising clicks faster
automating legacy KPIs
accelerating feedback loops that were never designed for B2B buying
AI isn’t fixing B2B performance.
It’s compressing time-to-mistake.
Signal: speed without better learning just amplifies noise.
I talked about this on LinkedIn this week, how we need to get better at chasing signals and not clicks if we want to move the needle - click the graphic to see the post on Linkedin
🤖 AI Quietly Becomes an Ad Surface — Not Just a Tool
OpenAI’s ad ambitions are no longer theoretical. The debate has raged for a number of years now, will OpenAI launch an ad product? or would that hurt the integrity of the discovery channel. The cat is now out of the bag - their ad product is coming and will be the most sensational new surface launch in many a year
Analysts now estimate ChatGPT-native advertising could become a $25bn+ business by 2030, putting it on a collision course with Google and Meta. I know for a fact thatGoogle have been planning for this for some time, and that their internal focus is entirely Google vs OpenAI. This positioning was always defensive against an ad launch, which would jeopardise paid search budgets.
LLM ad monetisation is the only viable threat to paid search, and paid search fuels the Alphabet machine.
Ads in GPT isn’t about banners in a chatbot.
It’s about buyers:
researching
comparing
shortlisting
sense-checking and generally full on working
…inside AI workflows before search, social, or websites.
We’ve been circling this for months. Now it’s real. This is massive - the future of intent lives here
Why it matters:
If early-stage intent forms inside AI systems, the cleanest buying signals may never hit traditional analytics stacks at all.
AI environments aren’t just tools. They are starting to impact work much like email did
They’re thus becoming top-of-funnel territory. Hell, they almost become the funnel
Sources:
Financial Times – https://www.ft.com/content/21455358-3cc1-4459-940f-b7798679b0da
Business Insider – https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-ads-chatgpt-25b-business-2030-advertising-google-meta-2026-1
🎯 Intent Shifts from Keywords to Context at Scale
Bombora and Comscore launched 300 new predictive contextual B2B audiences, combining:
content consumption
firmographics
install data
AI-driven inference
This isn’t “better targeting”.
It’s a reframing of what intent even is.
The industry is moving away from:
single keywords
single pages
single events
…towards probabilistic signal clusters.
Intent as it were will not survive the LLM movement, and as we saw above, that LLM revolution is gathering pace. I’m intrigued to see how they adapt as it becomes clearer by the day that a true intent product needs some lens into LLM - but this is noever likely to surface
Why it matters:
Intent is no longer something you detect.
It’s something you infer.
And inference demands governance, weighting, and decay logic — not just data volume.
My view? intent will lean much more on external signals like job role postings, and other such inference signals versus the original model which relied on publisher collectives and bidstream data
Source:
PPC Land – https://ppc.land/bombora-and-comscore-unite-to-create-300-b2b-contextual-audiences/
⚙️ AI Optimisation Is No Longer a Differentiator — It’s Table Stakes
New data shows:
82% of programmatic buyers expect AI optimisation as standard
58% are increasing programmatic budgets, with CTV leading the charge
This wasn’t framed as innovation.
It was framed as expectation.
We’ve crossed an important line.
That said, in some ways I am more interested in the 58% who are increasing programmatic investment. I think we will see a lot more pressure to coordinate signals into an ecosystem that spans channels, and I have sensed for some time that smarter buyers are tapping into the reach, frequency, context and richer advertising surface that premium programmatic brings and starting to re-allocate bloated social budgets - which in turn are increasingly fragmenting between paid social and B2B influencers - I explored this topic on Linkedin here - LinkedIn post link
Why it matters:
AI no longer helps you win auctions.
It helps you avoid losing by default.
The real advantage has shifted to:
what signals you feed the AI
how you define success
which behaviours you optimise toward
Signal quality — not algorithm quality — is now the moat.
Source:
PPC Land – https://ppc.land/majority-of-programmatic-buyers-now-demand-ai-optimization-as-ctv-budgets-surge/
🧠 Signals Collapse Directly Into GTM Workflows
Firmable rolled out search-based intent signals inside its sales intelligence platform, particularly focused on APAC markets.
This is subtle but important.
Why it matters:
Signals are no longer being “handed off” from marketing to sales.
They’re being embedded directly into:
account prioritisation
outbound workflows
GTM decision-making
That collapses the distance between:
signal → action → revenue attempt
And it raises an uncomfortable question:
If sales teams can see intent directly, what exactly is marketing optimising for?
Source:
PR Newswire – https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/firmable-launches-search-intent-uplevelling-buying-signals-for-apac-sales-teams-302666616.html
💸 Paid Search Waste Becomes a First-Class Problem
Channel99 launched an AI-driven push explicitly targeting paid search waste — not performance.
That framing matters.
Why it matters:
Efficiency itself is becoming a signal. And with the looming OpenAi ad competition coming, paid search has to deliver more outcomes. It has gotten away with waste.
Traditional signals were:
clicks and eCPCs
Keywords and impressions
conversions (however defined in B2B), often more kin to HVAs
…but how much friction exists between spend and value.
Expect more tooling that treats waste as a behavioural pattern not just a budgeting error.
If this thinking extends to channels like content syndication, social and poorly executed programmatic - there will be blood on the streets
Source:
WebProNews – https://www.webpronews.com/channel99s-ai-overhaul-targets-b2b-paid-search-waste/
🔐 Consent Controls Start Shaping What Signals Even Exist
Google rolled out more granular ads consent controls ahead of 2026 GDPR changes.
This isn’t a compliance footnote.
It’s structural.
Why it matters:
Consent states are becoming signal filters.
Two users can behave identically but generate radically different data exhaust depending on permissions.
Signal scarcity won’t be evenly distributed. It will be systemic.
Source:
WebProNews – https://www.webpronews.com/google-rolls-out-advanced-ads-consent-controls-for-gdpr-compliance-in-2026/
📣 Announcements vs Reality
What Vendors Launched — and How the Market Reacted
This week wasn’t short on announcements.
The signal wasn’t in what launched — it was in how practitioners responded.
AI copilots & optimisation layers
LinkedIn reaction: polished optimism.
Operator sentiment: “Still optimising the same KPIs.”
New intent partnerships
Immediate practitioner questions:
How fresh is it?
How does it decay?
What happens when it’s wrong?
Journey visualisation features
Welcomed for visibility. Questioned for actionability.
Signal:
Announcements are converging.
Reactions are diverging.
Differentiation will come from control, clarity, and signal discipline — not feature velocity.
🌍 Culture Still Leads Measurable Demand
Broader social and community trend reports reinforced a familiar truth:
Trust, relevance, and cultural resonance precede measurable performance.
What’s changed is the timing.
The lag between cultural signal and commercial signal is shrinking.
Why it matters:
By the time demand shows up in dashboards, the real signal has often already passed.
Source:
Hootsuite – https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-trends/
🧠 What These Signals Are Really Saying
Zoom out, and the pattern is clear:
Signals are moving upstream
Into AI tools, contextual environments, and pre-analytics spacesInference is replacing detection
Single events matter less than composite behaviourOptimisation is commoditised
Signal quality is now the competitive edgeGTM teams are collapsing around shared signals
Marketing, sales, and ops are consuming the same behavioural truthScarcity is structural
Consent, privacy, and dark funnels aren’t edge cases anymore
👀 What I’m Watching Next
Early evidence of AI-native buying signals
How DSPs ingest contextual + inferred intent
Whether sales-led intent tools outperform marketing-led ones
How teams redefine “success” once optimisation is assumed
If this direction resonates, I’ll keep breaking the week down like this — letting the news tell us what moved, then calling out the signal underneath it.
👉 Follow The B2B Stack for weekly Signals, not headlines.